$60 at the top of the bubble; it was already in decline when he took over; surely not (entirely) his fault. On the other hand, $35 in 2000 dollars is $47 today, so that’s a significant inflation-adjusted loss of value. On the other other hand, they paid out $7.69 in dividends during that time, which is a reasonable portion of what is lost to inflation.

Where am I going with this? Oh yeah, share price is not a great metric for company or CEO performance, and when its used people rarely evaluate all the factors correctly.

This. Why is everyone caring about share price? Look more at revenue and market growth. Xbox took over consoles, Bing is the only search engine to capture whole percenetage points of search from Google, and they still have an ungodly monopoly on enterprise software from office to visual studio.

Most public companies could give less of a crap about their share price after the IPO. What people trade shares for is really inconsequential as long as the company itself maintains 51% and stock market panics on them don't leak to their profit centers.